Veera Bhoga Vasantha Rayalu - the title of the movie gives us some interesting 'clues', a word the director is so fond of. If he had a dollar for every time the word "clue" was used, he could have earned the budget to pull off what he seemingly had in mind.
Indrasena R, the director of the movie, was definitely not short of ideas, some his own, some borrowed from Hollywood. The good news is that those ideas do not include obscenities. The bad news is that some of those ideas are outlandish to say the least. The parallel narrative-driven script has two parts - a police inspector (Sudheer Babu) looking for a girl-trafficking ring and literally, being handheld through his investigations, through a series of miraculous 'clues' that appear as if someone is laying a trail to guide him. Why? Don't know. Definitely didn't intend to be caught.
Meanwhile, another group of detectives (Nara Rohith and Shriya Saran) are looking for a missing flight and are blackmailed by the vigilante hijacker into killing 300 criminals. If that is not outlandish enough, they get the go-ahead and go about butchering those 300 without any efforts of any sort to figure out if they are actually criminals, and why, and how. Funnily, it was a covert police operation and yet, some of those killings were gory. Those boys having fun, huh? *Insert Ali's voice from Khaleja*
But, I think the makers had very early in the movie set the tone - logic doesn't work here, maybe ignore some gaps. So, we go about looking for other aspects of filmmaking, and that is when things get a little annoying. The vigilante cannot do full-bar pullups and is not a martial arts expert - and yet, they had a scene to just introduce him (Sree Vishnu) to us that way - graphically manipulated pull-ups. That was a first. There was a horse involved in an escape scene - because a hooded vigilante riding on a horse while it was raining was probably a fantasy the director had dreamt and yearned of shooting.
Nara Rohith and Shriya Saran do a brilliant job of pretending to do things while doing nothing. Their lines are trashy and expressions barely do justice to the role that was allocated to them. How did they agree to do what they were offered? Nara Rohith's character had his arm plastered right through the movie. Shriya Saran's dubbing voice had a mysteriously exotic accent and Sree Vishnu had a mohawk and weird, obviously-temporary, execrable tattoos - that was character-development for you.
The intentions were sincere, you've to give it to them - to draw awareness to girl-trafficking, the absence of intention amongst cops, and the headline-hawkish media. But, you could almost imagine the editor and director sitting in a dark room discussing mind-boggling ideas only to come out into the bright and make a mish-mash, a parody. Only it was intended to be a serious movie - a psychological thriller that has too many loose threads and unending incomplete bits. It would be fun to discuss them but then that would spoil an already well-spoilt movie.
Thankfully, the agony didn't last more than a couple of hours and not much time was wasted on songs. Children played an important role in what was happening around. You wonder, given some of the revelations in the end if children had scripted and directed the movie too. If only the creative team took care of the consistencies needed to shoot multiple timelines!
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film's producers or any other members of its cast and crew.